


morning eyes

by GryfoTheGreat



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ant-Man (2015) Spoilers, Canon Disabled Character, Established Relationship, F/M, Morning After, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-04 02:11:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5316377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GryfoTheGreat/pseuds/GryfoTheGreat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha smokes after sex.<br/>(Yes, really.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	morning eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU to Deliver Us from Evil where romantic stuff happens, and is thus not canon within the universe of that fic.

_  
_ _With those_ _  
_ _morning eyes._ _  
_ _And that_ _  
_ _morning voice._ _  
_ _In these_ _  
_ _morning sheets._

_I don't_ _  
_ _stand a_ _  
_ _chance._

_\- Nick Frederickson_

 

Matt’s apartment really is a dump, Natasha thinks. The paint on the brick walls is peeling off in flakes, there are fragments of broken coffee table everywhere, and the billboard is a constant, blaring distraction. It’s an odd contrast to the silk sheets snarled around her legs.

But the windows do let in a lot of light, and not just the synthetic kind. It’s weak, smoggy, city light, but the sun reaches in greedily to touch them, to pull fingers through Matt’s dark hair and bring out its copper, to turn her own to red-gold.

She stands up reluctantly, leaving the warmth of the bed behind, and digs around to locate some things - underwear, her bag. She extricates a pack of cigarettes from her beaten up tote, and, after a little more searching, a lighter. As she slips back into bed Matt stirs and seems to decide that her leg is a better pillow than an actual pillow, pressing his face against her thigh and sighing sleepily, hands winding around the limb like it’s a teddy bear. The colour of the contusion on his temple has dulled slightly; she runs a finger across it, and then slides her fingers into his hair, petting him absentmindedly as she concentrates on extracting a cigarette from the pack and sticking it into her mouth, all one-handed. The lighter takes a few tries to catch, but it does, and the rush of nicotine unfurls languorously down her windpipe and into her lungs.

It’s a dirty, awful habit, but it’s one she seldom indulges. Post-coital, mostly.

She feels Matt’s eyebrows knit against her thigh; the acrid smell of the smoke must have woken him. “Are you smoking?” he asks, vowels slurred by sleep. “Seriously? Is that an after-sex cigarette you’re holding?” He raises his head, making a pretty good stab at focusing on her for a blind guy, and gives her a facetious grin. “Natasha Romanoff, you are such a cliché.”

“It’s a tradition. Makes me feel like a real spy. Hey!” He snatches the cigarette from her fingers and takes a drag, making a screwed up face as he exhales the smoke.

“Ugh. Still as awful as ever. I can taste the rat poison.” He waves it vaguely in her direction,and she plucks it from his hand and stuffs it back into her mouth.

“Stop ruining it. You smoked before?”

“I went to college with _Foggy_. I smoked a lot more than cigarettes there, let me tell you.”

She chuckles. “Why on earth did you become a lawyer? All you ever do is break laws, as far as I can tell.”

“Says you.” She shoves his head away from her thigh. “Rude!”

“Don’t you know it.” She puffs a few trick rings into the air for her own amusement, seeing as he can’t see them.

She picked up the habit in the Bolshoi, when she was undercover. She remembers all the skinny ballerinas, packed into a tiny yard, puffing on cigarettes instead of eating lunch. Smoking became her way to blend in, in government buildings and outside hospitals. It was a good way to pick up information.She doesn’t know why she started doing it after sex. Probably an affectation she picked up from a movie or something, like a lot of her habits. Another thing she can blame the Red Room for; the Hollywood films drummed into her, teaching her how to be a Real American Girl.

Matt is drawing lazy patterns on the inside of her leg, deft fingers gliding carefully over her skin. “What are you drawing?” she asks.

“Letters. I don’t know. You just feel nice.” She smiles, caught off guard; he’s good at that sort of earnest flattery, knocking her off balance with his honesty.

Matt lies a lot, (he is a self-admitted manipulative asshole) but he doesn't lie to her.

“Charmer. I never thought I’d meet somebody better than Stark at getting girls.”

“And I’m a broke lawyer. Stuff _that_ up your suit, Iron Man.”

“Tony likes you!”

“He tried to make me bionic eyes.” Matt rolls over until he’s spread eagled on his back beside her.

“He was just trying to be nice. That’s how he does nice, along with offering you prime real estate and alcohol. You okay there?” Matt is attempting vainly to sit against the pillows; he slides down with a sigh.

“You broke me.”

“You broke you. Incidentally, you also almost broke a bridge.” Natasha rolls over onto her side to face him. “I was trying to help you feel better.”

“Well, you did that much,” he mutters, and she pokes him.

“ _That much_? Not what you were saying last night.”

He gives her a Look, and she flicks his nose. “Nat!”

“You’re cute, I can’t help it. Oh my God, you’re blushing.”

He pushes her hands away and covers his face. “Crap, I am. Irish skin. S’not my fault.”

“No, it’s the Catholicism. You are _such_ a prude.”

“You know what, I am not sticking around for the flagellation.” Maybe the beating he got last night was a lot worse than it looked, because when he attempts to get up and out of the bed he falls straight off and onto the floor with a crunch, taking the bedsheets and Natasha with him.

“Matt!” He groans abstractly, face-down, ignoring her frantic tugging at the sheets. “Please don’t pass out. I can’t take you to that Claire lady, she already lost her lease because of you, and if I took you back to the facility Tony would have a field day and Steve’d get all protective. He wants to meet you, do you know that? I think he thinks he’s my dad.”

“M’fine,” he grunts, waving a hand and pushing himself up. “Jesus, I have enough on my plate without Captain America trying to defend your virtue. I need…”

“Water? Painkillers?”

“Pants,” he decides.

Natasha rolls her eyes for her own benefit. “I _have_ seen you naked. Don’t you remember last night?”

“How could I forget? Look, you said it, I’m a prude. Pants.” She pushes him back down onto the floor (he lets out a yelp of pain) and gets up, grabbing some abandoned clothes and throwing them at him. As he struggles to emerge from under the pile of clothing, she grabs a shirt and pulls it on, not bothering to button it.

She rescues her cigarette from the locker, where it is burning a mark into the wood, and leaves Matt to his own devices, which mostly involve swearing. She saunters into the kitchen, kicking a few jagged shards of wood out of the way. The billboard, now blaring an ad for Oscorp, turns the shirt from white to green.

Her stomach lets out an angry growl, and she sighs. She had spent the entire day in a security briefing up at the facility (some idiot in a stupid suit calling himself Ant-Man broke in and Falcon couldn’t stop him, _what_?) before being called to Hell’s Kitchen to investigate a disturbance only to find Daredevil, somewhat more dead than usual, single-handedly destroying a drug trafficking operation.

(The mercenary part of her wonders, what he would be like if SHIELD had gotten to him before the anger did? He would have made a brilliant agent, whip-smart and strong and only obedient as long as he needs to be. But then HYDRA might have gotten their hooks into him, and… God. She can’t think about Matt-the-hypothetical-HYDRA-agent. He does enough damage as Daredevil-the-blind-vigilante.)

Eggs. Are there eggs? There are, which is surprising, because Matt lives on bad whiskey and Karen Page’s good graces. Natasha can’t quite match Karen’s Stew of Virtue (which she has eaten, as has Tony, who, ever the businessman, tried to patent the recipe) but she can scramble eggs and hope for the best.

By the time he’s sitting at the counter, wearing the aforementioned pants but no shirt (which she is not going to complain about), she has half a carton of eggs piled precariously on top of bread dripping in butter and a pot of tar black coffee, both of which last approximately three minutes. Matt is a gentleman, and lets her have the last cup.

“I could have cooked,” he says amusedly as she stirs sugar into her coffee.

“Your night was enough of a disaster without figuring a blind man cooking into it.” She sips her drink, which, by now, is lukewarm.

“Maybe you’re right.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “God. Did I really break a bridge?”

“It was close. They threw you into a cable and you almost snapped it.”

“That explains the…” He winces as he prods at the ugly red striation bisecting him around the waist.

“Worse than it looks. Your ribs are fine, and there’s no internal bleeding. You dislocated your arm, too, but I popped it back in.” She nods at the discolouration around his left shoulder.

“Christ.” He drops his face into his hands. “At least it’s Saturday. It is, right?”

“Yep.” She makes a face as she drains her cup, bitter dregs and all, and stands up to back to the bedroom. “I have to get back. Fury wants me in Latveria. There’s some wannabe dictator running around, he wants me to get a handle on the situation.” She starts rummaging in the wardrobe. She thinks she left clothes here last time. God, she hopes she did.

“Go save the world, Black Widow.” From the noises, she thinks he’s cleaning up. She’s located her jeans, but her jumper is a dead loss, covered in blood and muck of unknown origin. She’ll have to make do.

“Latveria has a population of roughly two million,” she calls, concentrating on buttoning her (well, Matt’s, but it’s hers now) shirt. “I wouldn’t call it the world, per se.”

“And here I am, micromanaging the shit out of ten blocks in midtown Manhattan.”

She snorts. “You’re maximising your productivity.” She pulls on her boots – they’re actually part of her stealth suit, but they pass as plainclothes if you ignore the rubber soled heels. She is pleasantly surprised when she finds that Matt hasn’t burned down the kitchen. “I’m going.”

“Is that my shirt?”

“Yes.”

He smirks, and Natasha almost reconsiders leaving. “Keep it. Probably looks better on you.”

Screw it. She strides over, grabs him and presses him up against the fridge and he doesn’t even resist, grinning against her lips, letting her pin his wrists above his head and raise bite marks on his chest.

(She’s never… wanted this before. Sex, to her trained mind, is a tool – a way to get information, to get someone’s sympathy, or even just a way of keeping the numbness away.

Matt makes it more. Like it means something.

Like she means something.)

She buries her face in the crook of his neck. He smells like soot and sweat. “Fuck you, Matt Murdock, but I’m going to miss you.”

One careful hand cradles her chin, and he brushes a thumb over her cheek. “I’ll be here when you come back. I promise.”

(In her life, people leave. Coulson left to lead SHIELD, Bruce left to redeem himself, Clint left for Laura, Fury left to root out HYDRA, and now Tony and Steve are slowly pushing each other away, fracturing the only family she has ever known.

Matt won’t.)

She untangles from him slowly. “I’d tell you to take it easy, but you won’t, so just… Don’t die while I’m not around, okay?”

“I’ll do my best.” He ruffles her hair, and she bats his hand away. “Go. There’s a taxi coming, should be right outside the door when you get down.”

He’s right, of course. It takes her to Stark Tower, where she borrows one of Tony’s bikes and drives upstate to be debriefed.

Tony’s there again, but she must have missed the argument; he’s tinkering moodily with Sam’s wings, which are pretty much kaput after the whole Ant-Man thing, and Steve is pummelling the shit out of a bag in the gym. Sam is holding it steady, wincing periodically in pain when Steve forgets his own strength.  She ignores them all. Rhodey’s in DC being their public face and Wanda… When does anyone ever know where Wanda is?

She sits down in the empty conference room and waits, closing her eyes.

For one golden morning, she was Natasha.

Now, she must be Black Widow.

When she opens her eyes, Fury’s tired face is onscreen. “You ready, Agent?”

“Always.”


End file.
